Cover

ALSO BY MARINA BUDHOS

The Long Ride

Watched

Dedication

To those seeking safety—may their stories be heard.

Epigraph

On May 7, 2018, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it had implemented a “zero tolerance” policy, dictating that all migrants who cross the border without permission, including those seeking asylum, be referred to the DOJ for prosecution. Undocumented asylum seekers were imprisoned, and any accompanying children under the age of eighteen were handed over to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which shipped them miles away from their parents and scattered them among one hundred Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters and other care arrangements across the country. Hundreds of these children, including infants and toddlers, were under the age of five.

—Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

Their faces assumed the awful craftiness of children listening for sounds from the grown-up world.

—J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Part 1: Brooklyn, New York, 2019

Chapter One

They’re coming.

It takes a second for the words to drip into the thick soup of my sleep.

They’re here.

The words make ripples in my half dreams. A lamp switches on and a bright band of light stings my lids. “Rania! They’re here.”

I wrench up from the quilt, my heart quivering. “Who?”

“Just come.” Ammi nods to the other bed, where my little brother, Kamal, is sleeping. “Don’t wake him.”

“Of course,” I grumble. I punch my pillow and force myself to get up. Kamal is protected. He’s sensitive. Don’t let him hear. With me, her voice is flat, practical.

I follow her out of the bedroom; she’s still in her jacket from work—a black windbreaker that makes a rubbing noise as she walks. The keys are still in the open door. She hasn’t even pulled out her sofa bed.

Several people are crowded outside our apartment. The fizzing, garbled sound of a walkie-talkie from the hall cuts through our living room. My heart speeds up. They’re in black quilted vests with POLICE on the back.

No. Not us.

A woman turns to me, the one with the walkie-talkie. “Hold,” she says, and clicks off. “And this is?”

“My daughter.”

“Any other children in the apartment?”

“My son.”

“And your daughter is how old?”

A hesitation. “Eighteen.”

“Ammi—” I start, but she flashes me a cool, forbidding look.

That’s a lie! I want to yell. I’m not eighteen for seven months—December. I’m tall, very tall, taking after my dad, so most people think I’m older than I am. I get away with a lot: the teachers who don’t say a word when I come to pick up my little brother; the kids who hit on me to buy them beer at the liquor store. Me and Ammi both stretch the truth when we have to.

The woman looks up at me. “We’ll have to see some ID, then.”